"Then I remember the name. And, Lord Jocelyn, I hope you will be grateful to me, because I have been the humble means of procuring him this distinguished post. Mr. Bunker, in fact, was, or conceived that he had been, useful to my grandfather, and was said to be disappointed at getting nothing by the will. Therefore I endeavored to make some return by taking his nephew into the House. That is all."
"And a great deal more than enough, because, Miss Messenger, you have all out of your kindness done a great mischief, for if you had not employed him I am quite certain no one else would. Then he would have to come back to me. Send him away. Do send him away. Do send him away, Miss Messenger. There are lots of cabinet-makers to be had. Then he will come back to society, and I will present him to you, and he shall thank you."
She smiled and shook her head.
"People are never sent away from the brewery so long as they behave properly. But it is strange indeed, that your ward should voluntarily surrender all the advantages of life and social position for the hard work and poor pay of an artisan. Was it—was it affection for his cousins?" She blushed deeply as she put this question.
"Strange, indeed. When he came to me the other night, he told me a long story about men being all alike in every rank of life. I have noticed much the same thing in the army; of course he did not have the impudence to say that women are all alike; and he talked a quantity of prodigious nonsense about living among his own people. Presently, however, I got out of him the real truth."
"What was that?"
"He confessed that he was in love."
"With a young lady of Whitechapel? This does great credit to the excellent education you gave him, Lord Jocelyn." She blushed for the fourth or fifth time, and he wondered why, and she held her fan before her face. "But, perhaps," she added, "you are wrong, and women of all ranks, like men, are the same."
"Perhaps I ought not to have told you this, Miss Messenger. Now you will despise him. Yet he had the impudence to say that she was a lady—positively a lady—this Whitechapel dressmaker."
"A dressmaker!—oh!" She threw into her voice a little of that icy coldness with which ladies are expected to receive this kind of announcement.